


Hard Bargains Driving You To The Floor

by APgeeksout



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Community: intoabar, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-04 16:52:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14597442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/APgeeksout/pseuds/APgeeksout
Summary: A Lunatic Fringe walks into a Neathy bar to meet an Affectionate Devil.





	Hard Bargains Driving You To The Floor

**Author's Note:**

> Set in mid-June 2014 in Dean’s WWE timeline. Vague spoilers for the Fallen London storyline ‘An Intimate of Devils’.

They keep it hot inside The Long Spoon, for the infernal crowd that runs this corner of Ladybones Road in the shadow of The Brass Embassy. The warmth feels decadent - delicious, even - when it first closes around you in the vestibule, but you know from experience that if you stay too long, it will make you sleepy and stupid and suggestible. You don't plan to stay that long, but a small, familiar, disloyal voice in your head wonders if it would really be so bad to wake up tomorrow without a soul to drag around.

You ignore it, just like you ignore the dozen pairs of hungry yellow eyes that follow you down the length of the bar to your agreed meeting spot. The Affectionate Devil is holding down a stool at the far end, his fedora resting on the gleaming surface of the bartop in front of him. He looks happy to see you, and it makes you wary, more so than usual. 

"Old friend," he says, rising to greet you, "you look burdened." He folds you up in an embrace, and the brimstone and honey notes of his cologne fill your throat. "Have you had a change of heart since our last little fireside chat?" he asks, close to your ear, his smooth voice soft and intimate.

You hold yourself stiff in his arms - mostly because your ribs are still fucked up, but also at least a little because you remember how easy it was to listen to his sales pitch the last time around. How near you came to giving away what little you have to call your own. "Not a chance."

He releases you at that. His eyes flash, sulfurous and burning with a barely-restrained contempt that sets you better at ease than his solicitousness ever could, as he gestures impatiently for you to take the stool next to him. 

"You're not ready to take me up on my offer, yet," he says, sulkily, and tips another inch of dark muscaria brandy into his round-bellied glass, "and I gather you're not here for the pleasure of my company. So, what brings a perilous and insightful gentleman such as yourself to a den of iniquity like this?"

The bright brass skull is heavy inside the lining of your battered grey overcoat, a dense lump of dead weight over your heart that you know he must have felt when he pressed you to him, and it burns against your palm when you pull it out and thunk it onto the bar in front of him. It gleams in the reflected glow of the flames in the hearth.

"I'm only dealing in favors today," you say, finally settling stiffly onto the stool. The toes of your boots tap an ungainly rhythm against the brass rail at your feet. "And all I'm taking is answers."

He takes a demure sip from his snifter and dips the well-manicured fingers of his other hand into the dark, empty eye-sockets of the skull. "Well, then, don't be shy, darling. Ask away."

You reach back into your coat, open your billfold, and thumb through its contents - a few Echoes, a scrap of paper scrawled with a room number at the Royal Beth, a set of phony credentials for the Ministry of Public Decency, an incriminating letter or two - until you find your prize.

It's a clipping cut from one of the cheap sporting news weeklies; it's not such old news, but its edges are already starting to yellow and turn brittle. The article is mostly just match results and betting payouts stitched together with a couple of grand quotes from Feducci. It's the inset picture that made you slice it out in the first place and that makes you spread it out on the bar now. 

In it, you're still in the center of the ring, your felled opponent just out of the image's frame. You're holding the match's golden prize in one hand, but mostly your arms are full of him, twined around your torso and smiling - if possible - even brighter than you. You remember that night: how he kept yelling in your ear, how you burst into laughter and other hysterics and smothered it all against his chest, how he felt like no weight at all. 

You ask your questions through a thick throat. "Who wrote the contract on him? Where's his soul now? What's the price-tag to put my hands on it gonna be?"

The Affectionate Devil studies Seth's face in the newsprint for a long, silent moment. You could probably have found a clearer shot in today's edition: preening in a sumptuous suit with his new mommy and daddy, or maybe standing over your shattered form, chair in hand. 

When he looks back up at you, there's pity in his eyes that you think might even be genuine. You definitely should have found a different shot. 

"Sometimes I flatter myself that I understand your lot," he says, and motions to the Soulful Barkeep to bring a glass for you. "I was never at Benthic, but I suppose a researcher there must feel the same about her specimens." He smiles his warmest, most charming smile, which is how you know he's got no answers for you. "Still, on very rare occasions, you do manage to surprise me." 

He doesn't say whether it's Seth or you that's surprised him today, and you know better than to use up your question on that. You don't say a word as he tips a deep measure of dark brandy into the glass before you. 

"I'd love to come to your aid - after all, you've always been such an excellent diversion - but I'm afraid I don't have any intelligence to share," he says with a shrug. "When your kind sell out, it's not always to us." 

You drain the glass in a single slug that burns all the way down your throat, through your aching chest, and into your hollow belly. 

"'S'nothin'. Just had a hell of a drink," you'll say, hours from now, when Roman catches up to you in the stairwell of a smoky flophouse and dirties his handkerchief on your damp cheek.


End file.
